I found and watched that documentary, "Amy".
Sadly, her story is not much different from the stories of the many addicts that die in their addictions, everywhere, every day, with the exception of her talent and fame. Which of course, in our money-obsessed culture, attracted many greedy and enabling parasites. (Every addict/alcoholic will attract the enabling parasites, of like kind, but most don't attract the money/fame parasites that Amy Winehouse did.) Yet every wealthy and famous person attracts those parasites, and yet do not die from it. So as ugly and exploitive as they were, it was not the greedy parasites that killed Amy Winehouse. It was addiction.
It would be easy to blame part of this on her lousy parents, but the world is full of people who grew up with lousy parents, and got over it. Sadly, for Amy, one of the overwhelming characteristics of addiction is that when we use substances and behaviors to alter how we feel, we never learn to properly deal with our feelings. So past traumas never get resolved. And they pile up. The addict just keeps self-medicating to avoid feeling them, and then the trauma comes right back as soon as the drug/drink/whatever wears off. Most addicts find their drugs of choice early in life, and so never really do grow up. As with Amy Winehouse, they remain childish, and weak-willed, and therefor tend to make bad life decisions, over and over again.
And to compound this problem of never getting over emotional trauma, and never growing up, addiction needs to keep itself hidden within the addict. So the addict tends to emotionally wallow in every bad thing that ever happened to them as an excuse for continually turning to their drugs of choice, to 'fix' those feelings (though they never really get fixed). So it creates a self-reinforcing habit of bad decisions = emotional trauma = escapism = more bad decisions and drama = more trauma = more escapism … you get the idea. The addiction hides in this endless cycle of blame and escape.
In time, addicts tend to become very grandiose, and needy, as a way of generating the kind of emotional drama, and trauma, that feeds their need to then escape from it. Thus, they often become 'addicted' to their enablers. They call it love, but it's not love. It's just part of the self-perpetuating cycle that addicts fall into, and can't get out. You could see this in Amy's life very clearly, with the endless string of loser boyfriends that she imagined she could not live without. She behaved like a helpless needy child because that made her a victim, and gave her that perpetual excuse to escape her victimhood with drugs and alcohol. A life she created for herself, and doggedly maintained, to feed her ongoing addiction. Any Winehouse was a victim of addiction. Not the victim of her life's circumstances.
People don't understand how all-encompassing and devious addictions really are. It's easy to fall into blaming life along with the addict, for what the addict is doing to themselves. But the truth is that Amy Winehouse had been given many great gifts: intelligence, looks, talent, creativity, a fantastic voice, … and yet even with all these amazing tools, and her eventual money and fame, she still could not beat her addiction. And it finally killed her. Just as addictions kill millions of people every year, all across the world.
We say Amy's death is a tragedy. And it certainly is. But so are all the others. We just don't hear about them. I guess what I liked about the documentary is that it shows people how incredibly debilitating addictions really are. And how incredibly difficult they are to overcome. And that people NEED HELP to do it. They cannot do it by themselves, with 'will power'. Because addictions are far more intractable than any amount of self-will can ever overcome.
I am truly saddened by stories like Amy's. Because I know them all too well. I've lived my own version of it. And I've heard hundreds of them from addicts and alcoholics in meetings from Chicago to Sydney. But I also have heard just as many stories of those who overcame their addictions, and went on to live happy and productive lives. And my heart fills with joy every time. Because I know what a miracle that really is.
I'm sorry that Amy Winehouse's story is not one of those. But she's not the first to die of addiction, and she already isn't the last. And there's already another young woman out there somewhere, right now, with a magnificent voice, a gift for writing songs, unstoppable beauty and intelligence, that's going to blow us all away when she hits the lights. And hopefully she will not have been born with a proclivity for addiction.
And then she'll change the soul of the world.
